There should be a rule about mothers. They should never be allowed to grow old. They should stay the age that they were when you needed them most, forever. They should stay vigorous, active, alert, fast, have eyes in the backs of their heads and the ability to take you out of the world they brought you into forever and ever, ad vitam aeternum.

Most especially, they should not be a reminder that all things pass.

Even mothers.

Every year Mom comes to visit around the weekend of July 4th, one of two annual visits that we exchange: her to California in summer, us to Seattle in winter. In her case it's work-related; she teaches at a summer Suzuki institute in Santa Rosa each year, and comes early (or stays late, depending on her schedule) so she can spend some time with us. Usually it's a matter of a day or so, before she dashes off again to pick up her own life. This time she spent the entire weekend with us, from Friday afternoon to Monday morning.

It was a productive weekend, if a little heavy on the nostalgia side. One of the late blooming side effects of pregnancy, besides the weight gain, is that hormones that have hitherto been a thing that mostly happened to other people have been catching up on lost opportunities. It would not be too much to say that I am turning into a girl, with all the irrational mood swings that accompany said stereotype. Despite my alarming tendency to burst into tears at the drop of a hat, we actually managed to get quite a bit done: things on my Denial List, which was seriously starting to grow to embarrassing proportions.

The long title for my Denial List is "Things I Should Be Doing to Prepare for The Baby's Arrival," and includes such practical things as, "find out about maternity leave" and "get a crib." The list is heavy with practicalities, all of which seem far too closely related to real life and maturity to inspire me to action. To date I have been procrastinating based on rationales that contain at least a kernel of logic to them. I will be 35 years old when Filbert¹ is born. I am a diabetic having her first child. The number of things that could go wrong with this pregnancy, especially given all the difficulties inherent in getting pregnant to begin with, have been of a variety that have left me reluctant to grow emotionally attached to the end product.

Except now I'm in the third trimester, the baby is as frisky as a cocker spaniel with a mouth full of peanut butter, and it's getting impossible not to think of him as a little person. Who kicks. And stretches. And really, really liked Iron Man.

I am, despite myself, emotionally attached. Go figure.

One of the greatest things about this experience has been how excited Mom has been, a far cry from how enthused she was about the notion of grandchildren a couple of years ago.

"If you have children," she said cautiously, "remember that I am very very old, so I will not be able to help."

...which, in its turn, was slightly better than her original interested reaction to a comment that I wanted to have children one day. "Are you sure?" she said, then. There was frank perplexity in her voice, as I recall; the same note that was in her voice when she used to ask me why I had decided to fall down the stairs. "Really? You and your husband?" And unspoken but implied: Why?

Nowadays she's fascinated by everything. 34 years after she had me, it's all new again. She's delighted by the prenatal books, and the little articles about the development of the fetus. "They didn't have these when I was pregnant," she said a little wistfully when we were going through What to Expect When You Are Expecting and looking at the descriptions: week 27! week 28! Maternal instincts -- hers, more than mine -- have kicked in with a vengeance, resurrected from some place of hibernation that she'd regretfully shoved them when we'd grown old enough to fend for ourselves. I put her hand on my stomach one night while Filbert was doing the salsa in there, and she felt him kick. Her face lit up in a way I haven't seen in a long time.

And the stories.

Becoming pregnant has caused me to cross some invisible bar of maturity in her mind. The commonality of experience (even if it is just a biological function spaced three decades apart) has opened up a treasure trove of stories that she has never shared before. Stories about her pregnancy. Stories about Tomoko, the little sister who she miscarried between me and Sako. Stories about our childhoods. Stories about her own childhood. Marvelous, tragic, hilarious little stories.

"You will see," she prophesied darkly, "if you have a child just like you--"

"My children are just like my sister," Tara said. We were over at her house for a July 4th barbeque, and she was clearing the table with one hand and juggling her youngest daughter with the other. "And my sister Rachel's children are just like my other sister, Melissa."

"Oh," said Mom. "In that case, you will be just fine."

I'm not sure what to make of that.

"I went into labor with you because I was making ham bao," she informed me, after getting into a little tussle with me over her suitcase. During her entire stay, if she saw me about to pick up anything that looked bigger than my purse, she'd immediately rush over and bully it out of my hands. The doctor's recommendation is that I not lift anything greater than 20 pounds. My mother's personal opinion appeared to be that 5 pounds would lead to immediate and devastating repercussions.

"I don't see what ham bao has to do with anything."

"I got the recipe from a very nice Filipino woman," she said wistfully, and bulldozed over me with the suitcase. Passersby who caught sight of us in the parking lot looked torn between disapproving and approving. When one watches a pregnant woman let the senior citizen twig of her mother load suitcases into the back of an SUV, I imagine it's a little hard to tell where the moral high ground should lie. On the whole, public sentiment appeared to lean towards sympathy with my mother and outrage over my apparent apathy.

"I remember those bao," I said.

"I was making the dough," she said, and demonstrated, raising her hands high over her head and letting them drop again with sound effects. "Bam," she said. "Bam, bam, bam."

"That doesn't look like kneading."

'Kneading' is not in the Japanese vocabulary. She looked blank, and said again, "Bam. I was making the dough. It was too heavy," she said. "My water broke. I went into labor early, for 36 hours."

In all my 34 years, she has never told me anything about her labor. I've been under the impression that most mothers mention it at some point during their child's career: I was in labor 9 hours with you, for instance. As a lever for guilt-inducing emotional blackmail, it's like shooting fish in a barrel -- far too easy for my mother, as it happens. She is an artist. She's never mentioned it before.

"Thirty-six hours," I said, taken aback. And out of some obscure sense of extremely belated guilt: "Sorry."

"It was the bao," she said charitably, and looked regretful. "That was a good recipe."

I made scrambled eggs for breakfast. I made a lot of scrambled eggs. Mom moved hers around her plate with blinking fascination, then carefully sectioned off 2/3rds of her portion and relocated it to my plate.

"You make so many," she said reproachfully.

"Um," I said. "Sorry. I thought the Guy was going to eat." He was already holed up downstairs in his office, doing -- who knows what. Desperately cleaning before his mother-in-law caught sight of the room? Maybe.

"When I was growing up, I used to dream about eggs," Mom commented in Japanese, doing something delicate and deliberate with a wedge of toast and her fork. "I used to want an egg so much. So very much."

Mom doesn't talk much about her childhood, except in the vaguest of references. We know, for instance, that she was in Manchuria as an infant, because we have a black and white picture of her in a little backpack being hauled around by my almost-as-tiny grandmother. We know she grew up during the latter part of and the post-apocalyptic fallout of World War II, because she is old enough, and displays all the terrifyingly frugal habits of a wartime child. Actual anecdotes are rare and far between, however. Whereas Dad liked to drag out every little snippet and story from the past, some of them even truthful, to entertain the masses, she (like Sako) has never been a big storyteller.

"Eggs," I prompted hopefully. "Didn't you have any?" Her family home in Japan is a farm. They have goats and chickens and small green frogs. The first two are domesticated. The last come and go as the whim takes them. Only one of those sets of animals make eggs people eat.

"Well," she said. "O-obachama (great-grandmother) was part of the branch family, but she had many children, and of course she preferred them. So every day in their obento (lunches) they would each have an egg, and by the time all of their lunches had an egg and the older boys had an egg and the older girls had an egg there would be no more eggs left. I would look at my lunch and see just rice, no egg, and be very sad and think, "I want an egg." But there were never any eggs."

She moved her food around on her plate again and added, "I came to the United States and I was wild about eggs. Your great-aunt Kanae, she also went wild about...." She trailed off and looked thoughtful. "Cream-puffs."

I started to laugh. Mom chewed meditatively on a mouthful of eggs and toast and looked rapt.

"Your sister," Mom said, with that special emphasis on the last word that was all about exasperated, pleasant nostalgia.

"She was a quiet kid," I told the Guy, who looked remarkably unsurprised.

"--Because Yuhri would never stop talking," Mom added in Engrish, "so she never had a chance to say anything."

Again, the Guy looked remarkably unsurprised.

"I talked a lot."

I distinctly heard the Guy mutter, "Talk."

"We lost her one day," Mom continued, still in Engrish (here translated to English because the grammar gods weep) "and then we found her on top of the refrigerator. Nobody could understand how she had climbed up there. She was only eighteen months old, I think? There was no way she could climb, the cabinet was too low from the refrigerator and it was too far from the ground -- but she was there, on top of the refrigerator."

"She started early," commented the Guy.

"Oh my God," I added, and immediately started viewing every high surface in our house in a totally new and appalling light.

Mom looked complacent. "It would be good if your baby is like Masako," she said, because she is innately cruel, and then chuckled happily to herself.

1. Filbert is not the child's real name. At least, I hope not. We've simply taken to calling him Filbert because -- something to do with nuts, which I don't really understand, but the Guy started it and much as I loathe the name it has somehow managed to stick. This being one of the few occasions that the Guy has managed to slip one by me, I will let it pass for now.

I figured out why I was having insomnia. Also crippling fatigue, hormone swings, and severe nausea.

Meet Filbert.

I'm a little pregnant.

Insomnia has not gone away, but it is less wearing than it used to be. I've developed a system, and that's good enough for me and the Guy, who is no longer forced to defend himself when I start thrashing in sheer rage on my side of the bed. I am small, but my legs and fists are quite mighty; he is prone to getting hit by friendly fire when I get upset at my inability to sleep. In lieu of staging a frontal assault, I now just get up and head to the other bedroom, where I can thrash around in isolation and eventually go down out of sheer pissiness.

It is not a mature or particularly dignified coping mechanism, but it works for me.

My sister's boyfriend John is in Argentina, climbing in Patagonia. At least, I assume that is what he is doing; Sako tells me that the airline lost his luggage ten days ago, and that it contained a great deal of very expensive climbing gear. When I called her earlier today, she was engaged in trying to track it down.

"That sucks," I said. "He's gone all the way there and he doesn't have any gear."

"It's okay. He has a lot of friends down there."

"So he's borrowing gear?"

"Yeah. And one of his buddies decided to bring extra."

"Lucky."

It's one of the perks of being a seasonal worker that you make good friends with people during a season, after which those people go off into the world and return to their places of origin. Yosemite's summer staff is, in many ways, a giant club of like-minded people with similar interests, similar lifestyles, and similar personalities from all over the world. The draw is obvious: the National Park is practically designed to appeal to the outdoorsy, active nature-lover. Seasonal work is obviously temporary, and most people who engage in it have to live a certain kind of lifestyle, one that involves traveling where the work is.

At the drop of a hat -- and my sister has actually been a living example of this, so I do not say this flippantly -- either Sako or her boyfriend could pretty much hop on the next outbound flight, destination unknown, and end up someplace where they have a friend who'd be willing to put them up, lend them stuff, and go climbing with them.

It's a vast and open-hearted community, by all accounts. Sako fits right in. If she had any real estate, I'm certain she would make it available to her friends, too.

"So the other day, the weather was bad so they couldn't go climbing," Sako said. "So they went hiking instead and found a headless body."

I should know to be prepared for these sorts of things when talking to Sako. And yet. "...what?"

"They found a body," she said patiently, "and it didn't have a head. It was a hiker or something who probably got lost or something."

"Oh my God. Did they bring it down? Were they able to ID him?"

"He was up there for a long time. They probably knew he was dead."

The use of the word "probably" implied a general lack of commitment to the proper authority notification process. "Did they go to the police?"

"Well, they're in Argentina."

"They have police in Argentina."

"It wasn't going to go anywhere."

"Yeah, but a dead body sounds like something you should inform the authorities about."

"I suppose," she said. She sounded unenthused. More, she sounded uninterested.

I had a sneaking suspicion. I voiced it. "They finished the hike, didn't they?"

"Maybe if they were in the park," she said, still on the topic of informing the authorities. "I could see that."

There is this about living the kind of itinerant lifestyle: if you are to survive it, you must be practical. Ruthless pragmatism is the order of the day. It does not hurt that both Sako and John are in (or in the case of Sako, about to be in) medicine; more than any other profession, I imagine pragmatism needs to be a dominant personality trait to succeed.

"They know pretty much where it is," she assured me. "They could probably point people to the location. They'll probably go back up and try to find it again."

"Crazy," I said, and hung up the phone to spend the rest of the day goofing off at home.

Sako is driving to Seattle from Las Vegas right now. She's on the last leg of her trip, which started on Saturday. She has to be back home by Tuesday, at least in time to get to the first day of her class; she claims that she needs it as a prerequisite for nursing school, although I'm skeptical when she says it's the last, or rather, one of the last.

There have been a number of classes that she says has been the absolute last one that she needs before applying to schools. One of the difficulties of nursing schools, as I understand it, is that many of them have completely different prerequisites, barring a common baseline. If she targeted one school and geared her prereq classes to that school only, this ongoing saga of piecemeal coursework would have a finite end; unfortunately, another of the difficulties of nursing schools, I'm told, is that there is a great deal of competition to get in. Sako is hedging her bets by working towards several schools at once, which may be all well and good from the strategic standpoint, but does rather lead me to wonder if she is not simply prolonging the undergraduate portion of her university career.

I am in no position to say that there's anything wrong with that, beyond wondering if after 13 years of straight college schooling, being on that side of the classroom podium gets a little tedious.

She called maybe a dozen times between her first phone call, around 10:00 am, and her final phone call at around 7:00 pm. "How far is your town from this other town?" was the gist of most of her questions.

Not that she was coming to visit us, she explained carefully. She was just curious. Well, maybe she might come visit. Maybe not. Anyway, how far would it be? We mapped it out for her on google.

Sako uses the phone more than anybody I know. It's a thing for quick chats and random tangents. The flotsam and jetsam that wanders through her mind needs an outlet, and that outlet is usually whatever's on speed dial on her cell.

"Oh my God," she said when I picked up. "It smells like cow."

...which allowed us to pinpoint pretty much exactly where she was on her route.

"It's so disgusting," she said. "Do you think being able to smell themselves makes cows suicidal?"

"After a while, you actually get used to the smell and stop noticing it anymore."

"Ungh," she said, and hung up.

"I'm not coming to visit," she told us at 4 pm. "It's 3 hours out of my way, so I'm going to just keep going north. I can stop at Portland or something."

"Okay."

"Unless I do come to visit," she amended. "How far are you from where I am, again?"

Two hours later she called to inform me that she was tired of driving. "So I'm coming over," she said, "if that's okay." And: "How do I get there?"

The Guy walked her through the directions. It took three more calls.

"Your sister," Heisenburg said, wandering in during the second to last one, "has the directional sense of a pika."

"...what?"

"I like pikas," he said thoughtfully, and licked his whiskers. "They crunch."

"And where the hell have you been?"

He floated his tail into a question mark. "Here and there," he said airily. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in a mastodon skull?"

"What?"

"I suppose you don't have room here."

"Why the hell do you want a mastodon head?"

"Not a mastodon head. A specific mastodon skull. We hit it off. I felt like we really had something," he said with regret. "Like triscuits and soylent green. There were sparks. Oh well. Where's the goat? Never mind," he added pleasantly, as I opened my mouth. "I don't really care."

"A creationist mastodon skull," I said with outrage.

Heisenburg stared dreamily past me out the window. "I like creationism," he said. "It's salty." And he wandered out again while I tried to come up with an appropriately crushing retort.

I haven't heard hide nor hair of him since Sako left, so I suppose he hitched a ride up to Seattle with her. It's apparently going to snow up there. He ought to love that.

It is raining outside like it thinks it's Seattle.

Insomnia caught up to me with a vengeance on last Thursday; the lack of sleep (I presume) made me extra susceptible to whatever bug has been crawling around my office, and I was out for most of the day -- literally out, in most senses of the word: out of office, out of mind, out of commission, out like a light ... which isn't to say that I actually slept.

It's been over a 3 weeks now, but insomnia and I have figured out a kind of armed truce. I get to sleep between the hours of 8 pm and 3 am, if I choose to take advantage of it ... and only if I fall asleep before 10 pm. From 3 AM to 9 AM, insomnia keeps me up, unless I wander around the house several times and crawl onto the sofa in the living room. There, I may (if I am lucky) fall asleep for an hour or so at a time.

It's all very wearing. Armed truce is maybe not the word. Conditional surrender might be more accurate.

The end result is that I'm a little more short-tempered than usual, and the commute home is sort of memorable in the way that it's really not: not memorable, I mean, because I'm in serious danger of dozing off during the drive. There have been more than a few occasions when I've had to swerve back into my own lane because my eyes have fallen shut. Do not, however, mistake the urgent desire to sleep with the actual ability to sleep. Exhaustion is all well and good, but it has yet to translate into really consistent sleep cycles. From time to time, insomnia gives me a free pass, but then it comes swooping back again the next night just to remind me who's boss. It's making me cranky, to be honest.

I called Mom on Monday, realizing that I had not spoken to her in a while. She informed me that she had fallen down the stairs on Friday night. She reassured me that she had not actually broken anything, and that she had also been (mostly) able to walk as of Sunday -- MOSTLY. Fantastic. -- when she'd finally decided to go to a clinic and get checked out.

"They put a thing," she said sadly. "What is the word? It is around my legs."

I tried to explain the word 'brace,' but she seemed to be getting it confused with her actual braces -- the metal ones on her teeth -- and the conversation went downhill from there. In between recriminations about why she didn't immediately seek medical help, and generalized swearing, it all got a bit excited.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"It was only a little fall. And it was late."

"But still."

"You are in California. It would not help."

"BUT STILL. You took two days to go to the doctor?"

"It was weekend."

"You couldn't walk!"

"Well."

Apparently, the only reason she did go to the doctor at all was that one of her students informed her that his brother had broken his foot and hadn't realized it until the doctor X-rayed it several days later. Under the persistent and very vocal badgering from her Saturday students, not to mention their offers to cancel their lessons so they could actually drive her in to get medical attention, she finally gave in and went the next day.

As of yesterday, she claims that she is all better. "Except swell," she said, which means 'swelling,' which she assures me does not hurt at all. Of course, one has to remember that pain is all relative, in her lexicon; she measures it against standards that I have never really understood. Does it hurt compared to smashing her thumb with a hammer? Does it hurt compared to being impaled with a 2x4? Does it hurt compared to actual death?

She was quite cheerful, which I suspect means that it did hurt, but just enough that she could be a martyr to the pain and enjoy being strong.

"I wonder if they gave your Mom Ibuprofen?" the Guy asked.

I eyed him.

"--which she wouldn't take anyway?" he tacked on, thoughtfully.

Sako is headed home next week to finish some of her last pre-qual courses for nursing school. I called her on Tuesday morning to tell her about Mom taking a header. Mom tells me that Sako promptly called her in turn.

"Did she yell at you?" I asked.

"No. She said, 'Mooooooooom,'" she said, with that note in her voice that was a perfect mimicry of how either Sako or I sound when we want to reach through the phone and shake this particularly frustrating parent.

I said, "Good," and, "It served you right."

Cranky, I'm telling you.

I have insomnia.

"Try wine," Sako suggested just now over IM. "It always helps me. Or whiskey."

Or Bailey's. Or Kahlua. Or--

"Or exercise," she added thoughtfully. "But don't exercise before you sleep."

I'm not sure I understand that. Does she mean I should exercise while I am asleep? Unconscious exercising? If only.

Everybody is full of advice when they hear that you have insomnia. It's like the hiccups: public domain and entertainment for the masses. "Do you have too much on your mind?" a coworker asked. "Are you really stressed out about something?"

I'm stressed out about not being able to sleep. It's gone on for almost two weeks now, with last night being the worst yet. At 4 AM I lay in bed, thinking quite seriously about just getting up and driving to work. Out of sheer perversity I stayed in bed until 5 AM, then 6 AM, and played cat's cradle in the dark without any string.

It's amazing the kinds of idiotic things it occurs to you to do when you're sleepless in the night.

"Are you going to go all Fight Club on me?" another coworker asked, which -- I suppose is a pop reference I should get, but I don't. Something to do with split personalities. He explained it to me. I forgot what he was saying almost before he was done. This is the problem with not sleeping. Your brain starts to go. God knows I'm no mastermind during the best of times, but this is getting ridiculous.

"Too much caffeine."

Thank you. I hadn't thought of that.

"I drank one cup of coffee yesterday," I told him. Caffeine is not something I regularly indulge in. "I had to, in order to stay awake during the day. Because I was sleepy. Because I have insomnia."

It all made sense to me when I said it, but I'm not entirely sure now. Somewhere along the line, that argument appears to have looped around and ended up back where it started.

I don't know.

I would kill to be able to lie down and grab a solid 24 hours.

The Guy had his company party on Saturday.

He went to my company party a week before, which was a Friday that happened to land on the day of a freak storm that battered California and took out power up and down the coast. I had originally RSVPed, but had then decided not to go, only to change my mind about an hour before the party.

"And you're coming," I told him, adding considerately, "Unless you don't want to."

As any guy who has ever been in a successful relationship with a woman will tell you, this is code for, 'I want you to come to be my support blanket, and if you do not come I will be understanding, but punish you anyway.'

"Sure," he said. "I'll be right there."

Say what you will about the Guy, he can read the writing on the wall.

The unfortunate result of my last minute decision change was that we were both wearing Silicon Valley chic at a party that had some very nice clothes on display. Jeans and sneakers are all very well in the office out here in geekland, but there is a time and a place for everything. Sadly, as usual, self-consciousness lasted for about two minutes, after which my nebula-sized ego forgot all about it. It did not hurt that, also as usual, everybody was sweet and did not comment on my excessively commonplace fashion sense. In case I haven't mentioned it recently, I really do work with some of the best people in the business.

The Guy's party was a different matter altogether. It's pretty unusual that we have a chance (or a reason) to dress up in our daily lives; his company's event was a White House State Dinner, featuring Walter Scheib, who was the chef at the White House during most of the Clinton administration and for four years following.

"The food will be good," he says morosely, the day of the actual event. He didn't actually say But... but a wife learns to read between the lines.

Saturday was, for several reasons, fairly stressful. There were appointments and deliverables, and assorted other problems. On top of a week in which raging insomnia and sleep apnea played a fairly significant part, the need to dress up and socialize with people one works with during the week itself seemed unnecessarily egregious. To dress up and socialize with people you don't even know but your husband works with during the week was especially brutal. Of course, I owed the Guy: turnabout is fair play, and he made a respectable showing at my company party, after all. We both collapsed in mid-afternoon, and woke up bleary-eyed and delirious from a nap about an hour before the actual event.

"Do you want to go?" he asked.

"Nnrgh," I said.

"Is that a no?"

I mustered what was left of my higher brain functions to consider the matter. "Mmfn," I said, which, translated literally, meant, 'I'll go if you go.'

We crawled out of bed. The Guy put on a tie. I put on a dress and heels. I even put on lipstick.

As is the way of these things, we actually had a great time. The Guy's prediction that the food would be good was dead on -- not really a surprise when the chef in charge headed the White House kitchen for 11 years. What was more surprising was that he proved to be quite a raconteur, full of hilarious and endearing and amusing stories about working intimately with two presidents and their First Ladies. In between courses, he explained what we were about to eat, and told us a little back story involving the recipes themselves. He was an engaging speaker, and a practiced one, and managed to be entertaining without ever being cruel towards the people involved.

"When you work for the White House, you check your politics at the door," he said.

I'm not a foodie, especially of late. My new diabetic diet (or it could be my medication, who knows) has made me a bit hostile towards food in general, which means I can't really enjoy it as much as I used to. The stories made the meal for me. Even when I can't remember what we ate, I'll still remember the tale of Jenna Bush and the tequila meat sauce, and Mrs. Clinton and the leg of lamb.

"It's funny how people always ask me what the difference was between the two presidents," he said at one point. "They seem to think that there's red state food and blue state food."

We laughed, because we're from California, and -- well, we do.

Scheib was brought on board because Hilary Clinton wanted to change the way that the White House did food. The previous chef did French food. What Mrs. Clinton wanted was to make the White House kitchens representative of America: eclectic, with all the influences of the hundreds of cultures that have made America home; organic and fresh, with all the food that is home-grown and available in the United States.

The First Ladies were always on one kind of diet or another, he said; they were careful about what they ate, and the nutritional quality of the food. The Presidents would've been perfectly happy if they'd just opened up a TGI Friday's in the basement. Somebody asked, was it ever difficult reconciling what the Presidents wanted with what the First Ladies wanted?

The rule of the House, said Scheib, is to make the First Lady happy. If the First Lady's happy, everybody's happy. Even if the Presidents would rather not be.

At the beginning of the Bush presidency, Scheib said, the President came to him and said, "Cookie," -- he called the chef 'cookie,' for whatever reason. I presume it's a Texas thing. -- "Cookie, let me tell you what I don't like. I don't like green food. I don't like salads. I don't like soup. And I don't like wet fish." Wet fish apparently meant any fish that wasn't grilled or fried.

A little while after that, they had one of their first state dinners. Mrs. Bush came to Scheib to work out the menu, and as part of that menu, she requested a green soup with a topping of light salad, with a piece of poached fish on top. Scheib listened to the order with some anxiety. "I don't wish to cause any trouble, ma'am," he said humbly, "but the President said--"

At this point, the First Lady fixed him with a Look. "I don't remember asking to know what the President wanted," she said. And that was that.

Keep the First Lady happy, that's the rule. The state dinner went ahead with the menu as she requested it.

We were none of us acquainted with real state dinners, so Scheib explained the mechanics of how these things work. The tables are ranked by order of importance. There is tier 1, which is the heads of state; then tier 2, which contains the slightly lower-ranked attendees, then tier 3, and so on. Obviously tier 1 gets served first, and then tier 2, and so on, so forth, with servers moving in and out of the kitchen in waves so that everybody gets served quickly and (more or less) at once.

The President of the United States plainly rates a Tier 1 table, and so he was among the first served. He looked down at his plate, saw green soup, green salad, soup, and wet fish, asked, "Did this wash up on shore?" and pushed his plate away.

Now, it being one of his first state dinners, he apparently was not acquainted with the way that the etiquette works at these sorts of things. When the President pushes away his plate, that is the cue for the President's Butler to take his plate away. And when the President's Butler takes away the President's plate, that is the cue for all the other servers to take the other plates away. So now half the room has not been served yet, but the other half of the room is having their plates taken away, and there are suddenly two waves of people trying to leave with plates and trying to enter with plates, and an utter domestic disaster as pandemonium erupts.

The chef looked out his window at this tumult of colliding and whirling bodies. "Oh boy," he thought. "Somebody's in trouble." There was never any real question of who that somebody was going to be.

That night, the word came down that Mrs. Bush had set her husband straight on future state dinners. "I don't care if you don't like it, Bushie. Don't do that again. From now on, just pick up a fork and move it around on your plate."

Scheib has a new business, and a book out that I think I'll be buying (or at least borrowing from the library) at some point soon. It's always very easy to dislike a president for his politics, his decisions, and his personality on camera. It's a lot harder to differentiate between the private person and the politician, a line that gets blurred far too frequently in American politics today. It's good to get the reminder now and again that even the devil likes quesadillas, and that behind the print and the sound bites there's also a guy who'd really just love to have a hamburger, if only his wife were out of town....

My sister still hasn't gotten that crown fixed.

Anybody surprised by this, raise your hand.

It has been two years since I last got my teeth cleaned, which corresponds almost exactly to the length of time I have not been living in Redwood City. My dentist before I moved was conveniently located kitty-corner from my ghetto apartment, requiring only that I change out of my pajamas and put on shoes before trotting across the street to get my teeth cleaned. Cavities and dental health may be a motivator for most people's regular checkups. For me, convenience is a bigger factor. Our new home is half a block away from a large complex that claims to house an entire fleet of dentists, and yet I remain tied to my old provider. Even if I don't visit him as regularly as I should, he is still my dentist, and I eye the geometric brownness of the neighborhood complex with great suspicion.

I do not like change, is the moral of this story. Even if it means that my teeth will fall out.

Having moved 20 minutes away from my old place, I had not previously had the motivation to get my teeth looked at again. It wasn't so much that getting in the car and driving that distance was inconven-- no, wait, that was the real reason. Hitherto, my work was south, whereas my dentist was north, which anyone will tell you are mutually exclusive. Some people (like my husband) would tell you that it is not beyond the realms of reason that one could go to work, then drive north to get to an appointment, then drive south to get back to work. I will not even bother to go into the reasons why this would not work for me, mostly because I'm not sure that there's any way to explain it that wouldn't result in me being universally condemned as a total freak. You will have to trust me. It simply wouldn't have worked.

My new job conveniently removes the whole north/south difficulty. My dentist is north. My new job is norther. My stars have aligned. Thanks to the consideration of cosmic forces, as of Tuesday, I now have clean teeth.

Yay.

After two years, the session went rather better than I expected. I am, I confess, one of those millions of Americans (and billions of ... well, not-Americans) who do not like to floss. It has been a repeating refrain over the years as I lie in the dentist's chair and cringe at the sound of scraping picks.

People tell me that the sound of the drill is actually the worst sound in a dentist's office. I have not found this to be the case, mostly because I have only ever had preventative cavities: holes that were not really holes, but rather irregularities in my molars that were filled in in order to prevent possible future decay. (This, to me, is like making roads extra thick in order to prevent future potholes. It's possible that this actually works, although if you live in the Bay Area, you have empirical evidence proving otherwise.)

In terms of sheer repetition and frequency, teeth scraping looms large on the horrible sound measure, at least in my experience. There is the squeak of metal against your teeth, which sounds like you are biting slowly down on an excited rat, and then the vibration factor, which is like the Sweet Arbor Home bowling team rolling rocks around in the empty chamber of your skull.

Conversations with dentists have normally gone like this.

"You ha--" squeak squeak squeak "--build-up an--" squeak squeak rumble "--flossing?"

"Nuh?"

rumble squeak rumble "--should flo--" squeak squeak SQUEAK

"Ungh!"

"Sorry. Floss more re--" SQUEAK. "Spit, please."

After each cleaning I've held my bleeding gums together with one hand, clutched the sample bag they give out like candy in the other, and promised my dentist, I will floss more next time. I will! -- only to remember that night at home that flossing requires mess and fuss and Inconvenience, which puts paid to the entire notion until the next time.

Somewhere in my home there is a bucket of floss that could keep a South African village in stock for the next 10 years.

The issue here is that I don't mind doing things if they're made easy for me, a sentiment that identifies me as typically American. This is why those small, disposable floss picks you can now buy in supermarkets and drug stores will be single-handedly responsible for my ability to chew real food well into my forties. While the environmentalist in me is appalled by the kind of waste represented by their purchase, the lazy ass in me is delighted. Cleaning my teeth without ever having to touch my mouth is, by any definition of the word, awesome. Convenience is the key. They keep me entertained at work, watching TV, working on the computer, reading books--

My last cleaning took all of 5 minutes.

"Hm," said my dentist. squeak squeak. "Rinse, please?"

I bet you thought there'd be a point to this entry.

Sorry.

My sister has a broken record quality to her at times. "Come down to Yosemite and visit me," she says. "When are you coming down to Yosemite to visit me? Why don't you come down to Yosemite to visit me? You're never going to come down to Yosemite to visit me, are you?"

This summer will be her last at the park (she claims) since her summers and her winters will be taken up by the need to finish nursing school in the limited margin of time they permit a body to get a nursing degree. It is a stepping stone to a better life for her, at least in the economic sense: she does not begrudge it, or at least not aloud to me. Once she has established herself as a gypsy nurse, she will likely go back to spending her summers at Yosemite again.

"Gypsy nurse." There's something so outstandingly odd about that phrase.

She's vocal about trying to get us to come, but she isn't nearly so expressive about explaining why we should come. She's eloquent enough about Yosemite, but mostly emphasizing those aspects of it that we, as luxury-loving homebodies, would be least likely to enthuse about. "I live in a cabin," she told us at one point, offering the information as an enticement. Since she promptly followed that up with, "It doesn't have windows. Or doors. Or walls, as such," the image of the cozy cabin in the woods promptly gave way to an image of abject misery, mold, and bored wild animals and insects roaming in and out at will.

I question how a body can have walls "as such." Sako claims that canvas can make a wall. Me, I'm more of the brick and mortar school. If I can cut through the wall using a dessert fork, it is not adequate to my needs.

It's in pictures that she manages to do all the persuading that her stories fail to accomplish. She sends them from time to time, in massive chunks of arbitrary data. They could be labeled descriptively for what they are: the occasional brain dump, without context. Here is a picture of Sako waving her arms in front of a mountain. Here is a picture of complete strangers drinking beer over an inflatable raft. Here is a picture of some more strangers eating dinner by candlelight outdoors.

Here is a picture of a rock and an anonymous big toe.

Occasionally though, Sako manages to take some breathtaking, brilliant photographs. They happen without warning in the middle of a collection of utterly bewildering images. I'll flip through thumbnails, staring blankly at strange faces, and find myself caught by a picture of absolute, heart-stopping beauty. She has creative genes in her background -- our paternal grandmother was an artist; our paternal grandfather and father's generation were all musicians -- but in her it comes out in erratic bursts and bubbles, like small burps that have been suppressed too long for comfort. She does not bother to nurture or develop these strange and unpredictable talents of hers, but they're there. My sister the slacker is a goddamn genius.

You have no idea how annoying that is.

I remember Mom despairing over her when she was younger, clutching a handful of pictures Sako had drawn in which serious, impressive talent was mingled with the kind of haphazard scribbling only a bored child who'd rather be doing something else can produce. Her report cards tended to say things like, "Has talent but does not apply herself." "Lacks concentration." "Does not fulfill her potential."

"Your daughter," Mom used to say to Dad, which would just make him snicker. It's possible he took it as a compliment. He was not, perhaps, the most mature of parents, but he had a kindred spirit's appreciation of the wayward and the rebel. Sako was more like him than I ever would be.

Of course, seeing where it's taken her, who could possibly say that he was wrong?

Allow me to backtrack a little to a few days past.

My mother gets odd mail, which I blame as much on her tendency to give random donations to equally random charities -- a check here, a pair of old shoes there -- and her apparent inability to distinguish between junk mail and real mail. She has a reverence for the written word that borders on the pathological. Kami, she reminds me from time to time, means both "paper" and "god," though using different characters and with emphasis on different syllables.

While she understands the concept of fiction and enjoys it as much as the next person, there is an odd disconnect in her mind between that and false advertisement, for instance. Context no longer applies when it comes outside of a book. Sometimes it doesn't even apply when it comes within a book. Articles in The National Enquirer are just as likely to prompt anxious inquiry as the most carefully researched article in the New York Times, with little discrimination between the two. An explanation that one is fiction and one is subjective fact meets with polite skepticism: why, when words are so important, would anyone write down lies? Did you see, Yuhri, that there was a baby born with two heads in Texas to a woman who was abducted by aliens?

I worry what will happen when she starts getting penis-pump spam. There's a conversation I really don't want to have.

As I say, my mother gets odd mail. A few days before we left, I flipped through a stack of envelopes on her kitchen counter, more out of a lack of anything to do than any real curiosity. From time to time, she still gets mail meant for me, mostly requests for money from my alma mater and my fraternity's non-profits, or magazines from the alumni associations of the same.

It was the envelope that caught my eye. Rather, it was the text on the corner of the envelope that caught my eye. There's just something about the phrase, "Free," when linked to the phrase, "pre-paid cremation" that strikes a body.

A living body, that is. One that has received that particular offer in the mail.

"Mom," I said. "You get weird mail."

It is true that my mother is not, shall we say, in the first blush of youth; she qualified to get social security checks a few years ago, and waves her senior citizen credentials with all the enthusiasm of a nun displaying her very first syphilis-positive diagnosis. Nonetheless.

"--She got what?" Sako said. "How come I never get those kinds of offers?"

It is true that any business has the right to advertise, and probably needs to in this day and age. Also true that death is a multi-billion dollar industry, and there's a lot of competition for those dollars.

Nonetheless.

My mother, who thinks happily and morbidly about death at the drop of a hat, hardly needs the reminder from an outside source. She is given to reminding her children about the arrangements for her burial and disposition of her effects, a reminder of mortality that we, her children, neither want nor need -- particularly since she usually accompanies those reminders with the hopeful remark that the world will probably end before that, anyway, and have we made emergency plans? My sister can usually answer yes, while I must usually answer no, a sure fire way to kick off a lecture about the importance of being prepared for all eventualities. I do not deny the truth of that, but after all, the end of the world is customarily accompanied by annihilation and sudden death; as I have told her a couple of times, I'm not entirely sure what a water purifier would do for me if the seas (for instance) turned to blood and rose up to blot us off the face of the earth.

"Well, you might get thirsty," Mom says, which makes sense in her mind, if not in mine. Then again, she has a less Biblical concept of Apocalypse.

I'll maybe talk about that some other time.

In retrospect, it's possible I'm more annoyed at the combination of the two words, "free" and "pre-paid" than I am by the offer itself. It seems to indicate a lack of commitment to the concept of "free," or at the very least, a lack of understanding. I'm not entirely sure I would want to entrust my corpse to someone unable to grasp such a basic concept. If "free" poses such a difficulty, what trouble, then, might they have with "fire?"

I am resigned to funereal urns occasionally sounding a rattle when you shake them. I'm a little more dismayed by the thought that they might squish.

The writers' strike these past two months is impacting us in the way where we now watch DVDs instead of TV. In many ways, this is actually worse; the addictive quality of starting a full series -- like Babylon 5 -- wherein you know that you have access to the next story in the arc available and ready to hand and all you have to do is select the next chapter....

Let's just say that the Guy and I have spent a lot of time on the couch these past couple of weeks.

Jazz, meanwhile, has pinged me with this small jewel, a blogger who not only links to youtube tracks of one of my favorite canceled television shows, Cupid, but actually goes through the episodes one by one.

If he could find just find recordings online for Remember WENN, my cup would runneth over.