The Thought of You
By Harold Rome
The thought of you surrounded me, enfolded me --
I saw your face around me, everywhere.
At night, among the starlit waves, all I could see
Was you there...you there.
You, sleeping in your room,
You, fishing off the dock,
You, coming toward the house,
Smiling just to hear me talk.
And, then, at once, it happened very suddenly
As if someone had come and closed a door.
I searched, and couldn't find you in my memory,
No more. No more.
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Last one from Memories, that play I was in in tenth grade; this is not, in truth, a poem, but song lyrics by Rome from the musical Fanny (1954). However, I knew it without music before I knew it with, and it holds up well enough that I decided to post it despite the sentimentality.
It has not been an ideal day. In addition to the sick cat all morning and the raging thunderstorm we are getting now, my son's rash -- which had appeared to be holding steady -- took an abrupt turn for the worse in the evening and is now all over his torso and thighs. Too embarrassed to call my own pediatrician so late after I had called to ask whether he should come in earlier and concluded that he was probably all right for the last full day of school, I e-mailed photos to my oldest friend, also a pediatrician. She said it looked possible that it was either chicken pox or impetigo...in either case, he should not be around other kids. He is a little bummed about missing the very last day of school (only half a day, anyway) but he is quite upset about missing the group get-together with his friends that he and my younger son had planned for tomorrow afternoon.
So I will be home all day with a queasy cat and a sick child, except when I'm taking the child to the doctor, and I didn't even finish two articles from today due to the vet. My only "break" this evening came in the form of taking younger son to Toys R Us to exchange a gift, as I had promised him that I would do: he had to have the Darth Vader voice synthesizer. Fortunately I had a lovely lunch with
I did these days ago and forgot to post them:
1. Multiple POVs in a single scene. This is often a big fiction-writing no-no, as it can lead to whiplash leaping from one character's head to another; but what makes it amateurish and clumsy is oddly often the very thing that also makes it emotional and sexy in fanfic, which, let's face it, I have never read for literary reasons.
2. Janeway/Chakotay. I should have wanted her independent and unfettered. Somehow exactly the opposite happened.
3. Second person. Almost never well-done in literature (and no, Bright Lights Big City is not well-done either IMO). Sometimes it works very well for mucking around inside the heads of famous characters, however, where first person can seem very awkward.
4. Lupin/Snape. If it was my universe, Sirius wouldn't be dead and Lucius wouldn't be irredeemable, so things would have played out very differently. But things being as they are, I have different priorities.
5. POTC slash. I really didn't see it when I saw the movie, or the second or third or fourth time. But the more I read, the more it grew on me.
1. Something that is red:
A RanDoM Flight button. If you know what that is then I know which fandom I know you from. *g*
2. Something that is shiny:
The gold cap on my India Temple Oil.
3: Something that is ugly:
One of the guys on my kids' tabletop soccer game.
4. Something that is made of wood:
The frame around my drawing of Boromir by
5. Something that is sharp:
An eagle-head letter opener.
1. How do you feel about the technology advancements of cloning people and animals? I wish it were being used to help more people and animals live longer, healthier lives, to provide enough food for everyone without requiring the deaths of animals and things like that, and less so people can try to duplicate their favorite pets, though if the latter is paying for research in the former then I guess it's all to the good.
2. If this technology became readily available to all, how do you think this will affect the future of our race? To all? We're so far away from that that it's a ridiculous question. I do not think The Island is a threat, if that's the question.
3. If your much loved pet died and cloning was available, would you elect to have your pet cloned? What about family and friends? No, never, in terms of the pet; and the rest of the question makes it all start sounding a little ridiculous.
4. Would your family have your consent to be cloned? Why or why not? See, now the questions are getting ridiculous too. If we had the technology to clone just my liver and I had liver disease, my family would certainly have my consent to clone those cells. If cloning any of my other cells could save a child with a congenital defect, ditto. But I hardly think I need to worry about my kids trying to breed a new me if something happened to me.
5. If you had the authority to clone any person no longer alive, who would it be and why? Adam (as in Adam and Eve) to get a look at the earliest human genome. Look, these questions cannot be answered coherently in a few sentences and I'm not in the mood to write a science fiction novel, so let's just say I oppose the cloning of individuals as opposed to individual cell groups.
Hope everyone in California and the rest of the west coast is all right -- the news has just cut into basketball coverage with earthquake information.
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