Poem for Thursday and Minivan Departure

I Married You
By Linda Pastan

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity—
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.

--------

I got to spend an awesome afternoon with Dementordelta in craft stores and watching Geoffrey Rush! And also watching George VI on The House of Windsor, because watching Geoffrey Rush does not quite qualify as a King's Speech love-fest even if we bought teapot charms and "Keep Calm and Carry On" note pads -- and Delta brought me a couple of biographies of Mrs. Simpson, plus both sets of Commander in Chief on DVD, so I got lots of good stuff. And we had soup and spinach pochettes for lunch at La Madeleine and spent longer than strictly necessary in World Market because it was raining so hard we didn't feel like running through the parking lot till it stopped.

We also watched Geoffrey Rush on Graham Norton and in The Warrior's Way (which remains very entertaining crack -- incredibly bloody and a couple of really triggery near-rape scenes, yet condemnatory of the macho idiocy of Westerns and Ninja films alike). In the evening, after Delta had to go home, my family watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix -- I get a kick out of Umbridge but the legilimency scenes remain my favorites, plus Rickman's delivery of the words "No idea" to Staunton's shrill questions. The other big event around here was that our first minivan, with the broken air conditioning, has been donated to the Hebrew Home, and their driver arrived to pick it up:


Here is the Plymouth Voyager, which we bought at Maryland Motors in 1998 -- neither the model nor the dealer still exists.


We had to remove our license plates before turning it over to the Hebrew Home.


The van has 131,889 miles on it and has driven across the U.S. twice.


Here is Paul turning over the title with the van.


At the time we got the van, I seriously thought about getting a license plate that said "Janeway" -- that gives me as much of a sense of the era as the fact that younger son was in a toddler carseat.


The driver got the van ready and loaded it onto the truck...


...and off it went.

Joyeux quatorze juillet!