By Liz Waldner
Veldt? Sounds good to me.
Like melt. Back when you could eat Velveeta
and call it cheese. My grandfather's macaroni and cheese
featured a whole brick of Velveeta. I liked peeling away
its beautiful silver wrapper, Velveeta Velveeta all over in blue.
The expanses of time in which there was this grandfather
appeared endless when I was in them. Who
could see to the ends of the plains and so see her end
beyond them? Who could think to look? You
(like Ohio and its vowels) went on forever,
just ate your macaroni and cheese, relishing
the brown bubbles on top, then did the next thing,
were the next moment surrounded and held in it
by all the things you didn't know would end.
Nothing ceded. No portend.
Only geranium and melamine
and thank you,
everywhere preceded by some please.
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From this week's New Yorker.
I am still totally behind on everything because Adam wasn't home anywhere near the time he usually arrives, prompting a flurry of phone calls, first to the parents of his friends (who didn't know where the kids were), then to the school (which wasn't answering the phone), then to the county to see whether something happened to the bus, before Adam finally got around to calling himself to tell me that he'd stayed after school for a couple of hours for viola sectionals but he was going to catch the late bus home. So the laundry did not get folded. Then we went out to dinner at California Tortilla (and Baskin Robbins for the kids) because the middle school was doing a spirit event where local restaurants were donating a percentage of profits, so I was chatting with people and didn't get anything done in the evening either.
I did finish designing and ordering my fannish holiday cards, which involved spending lots of time hunting through photos on my almost unusable desktop computer, then copying them to my portable hard drive so I could make use of them on the laptop. My family holiday cards have arrived, but they're a big disappointment for the first time from Shutterfly -- I wanted a photo from the Bar Mitzvah and used one taken by a friend, but the image looks much more blurry and overexposed on the cards than it did on the web preview. Adam wanted to see the Penguins of Madagascar, so we watched the Merry Madagascar Christmas Special at 8, which was silly but entertaining, like the movies. So the laundry-folding has been postponed till tomorrow along with e-mail, comments, etc. Apologies!
A zebra in the Maryland Zoo's African region.
Also in the African area, a leopard...
...a warthog (you may commence singing "Hakuna Matata" now)...
...a dik-dik (you may commence making the same jokes my kids do now)...
...an elephant (the baby was in the back with his mother, having been out playing all morning)...
...a chimpanzee (whose baby clung to her until she chased him up the bars to play)...
...gazelles (surrounded by termite mounds and guineafowl munching in the grass)...
...and a lion (whose equally sleepy-looking mate was lounging in the grass a few feet away).
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