The “finally” in yesterday’s post was because I was going to make a birthday entry on the night of the 17th, when it was the morning of the 18th in Singapore and I sang you were born in the zoo…* to my father over the phone — but then I decided to wait until my timestamp would show the right date over here. The internet makes my brain care about stupid things. Anyway, despite the fact that it is now the day _after_ his birthday in the time zone where he lives, I still do not have a present for my dad. So I am soliciting suggestions: he is intellectual, yet cheeky, and he already has 10 million books. Also he likes yogurt.

Well, he does.

And he turned 59 this year. (I just breathed a sigh of relief there when I was counting in my head, because for a moment I was afraid it was really 60, and I had forgotten to make an embarrassingly big deal out of it. Next year I will take great pains to do so.)

I’m trying to remember my best birthday. I think it is a toss up between the year I got the battery-operated toy dog I was lusting after for literally months (I was 7 or 8 and it was the ’80s. Next to the Aibo that thing was like a drawing of a dog on a stick, but I woke up that morning and saw it on the table beside my bed and all the world’s oceans leaped into my heart) and the year I turned 23, when Ben and I had a totally kick-ass party on South Street in Waltham, the house filled with warm faces and dancing and I was just, just, just starting to maybe perhaps believe I could be in love with Ross. I suppose it helped that he let me line his eyes and paint his nails black, and that he was wearing his “I’m a Viking” t-shirt.

And that he gave me this.

Then I knew he really did have a strange enough brain inside his head for me to love.

What was your best? Don’t tell me the worst — I’m not in a mood for worsts these days.

*I didn’t really. But I would have if I’d thought of it.

It’s finally my Dad’s birthday! Hooray!

…and then choose your route.

I remember learning to ride a two-wheeler. My dad taught me, mostly in the large corridor outside our flat (apartment to you) on the 8th floor, where we lived until I was thirteen years old. I would go from one breezy, beautiful landing to the other, from sea view to a view of our beautiful green housing estate, passing the lifts (elevators to you) on the way. Funnily enough the hardest thing was figuring out how to turn around and come back; is that always the case?

When I had learned I felt tremendous — strong, free, smart, powerful. Coordinated. When I was a teenager and between friends, I used to go for long bike rides by myself by the beach. It gave me something to do for a couple of hours, and it made me feel a tiny bit like I was escaping, for a while, the things I pretended I didn’t care about. But biking by the sea in Singapore is a matter of following a trail — I just went from one end to the other and back again. From the pier to the parking lot.

I remember always sitting on the right side of the back seat of our car, because that was my spot and the left side belonged to my sister. She sat behind my mother; I sat behind my father and watched his head while he drove. We never switched places — that would have been absurd. There was always music playing or the mellifluous accents of the newscasters on the BBC speaking about places whose names I knew but couldn’t picture: Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, Gaza. Falling asleep above the rolling wheels, with my parents’ conversation laying itself over me like a blanket — it was so much better than closing my eyes in my own bed, where it always took me too long to lose myself and every light that darkened through the window worried me. At the end of the night a hand would open my door and two arms carry me home. I never needed to look out the window to see where we were going.

I don’t really wonder if I’ll ever feel that strong and free again, or that safe and assured. I guess I know I won’t. But I do feel like I’m the one in charge of where I’m going now.

There’s only so many moody, arty pictures a person can take before she has to document her dinner again. Here is the grilled mahi-mahi with mango salsa we made tonight. We had a very wrinkled mango lying around from two weeks ago, and George Foreman’s chatty grill-machine cookbook said, “Hey! Why not make this delicious mango salsa?” So we did. We also grilled asparagus (mmm, nutty greens) slathered in a spice rub, which Ross insisted on eating with mayonnaise for some reason. (Probably that it was good. I tried it.) Anyway, we ate well tonight, and very healthily, and the wrinkled mango got put to good use, in one of the very few fruit-in-main-meal incarnations that I find acceptable.

Don’t we have ugly plates? I bought those online in a 16 piece set with mugs and bowls and little plates and things four years ago, and when I took them out of the box they had been in storage in some godforsaken warehouse for so long that they were actually dusty. I always intended for them to be temporary; I never thought I would move, and be married, and these would still be my plates. Sigh.

Since this is such an oppressively banal entry, I’ll tell you about the deep thought Ben shared with me on Sunday evening, when he called from Virginia to say hello (wind breathing over our conversation as he continued on his way). I told him about our neverending rain, and he said something rather interesting and profound about living with the weather on the trail, how you see it begin and continue and come to an end, and how one day he went into a supermarket and came out to discover the parking lot floor all wet from a shower, and felt it bizarre in his bones that he had been inside and missed its happening at all.

Then he told me how he’d recently run out of ideas, and had to look in a newspaper to find some.

I said, “Huh? Ideas for what?”

And he said, “Ideas to think about. When I’m walking. I ran out.” And explained how except for a few minutes a day, when you’re planning your route or cooking a meal or packing up, there’s nothing around to distract your mind and it has to rely on itself for amusement and edification.

For a moment I thought how astonishing it would be to spend that much time in the day thinking, just generating thoughts, not filling my head with other people’s words or getting frustrated with the T or wondering how the pile of laundry in the cupboard got so big; just letting ideas quietly rise and fall like the tide, my mind a great moving sea with no shore.

And then my neighbors downstairs started playing their annoying music with the thumpy bassline, and I lost my train of thought.

*******

Tonight I talked to Sarah for almost an hour and I just want to say how lovely it was to hear her voice.

That is all.

More from foggy Friday here.

Happy Mother’s Day… I am lucky to have you all in my life.

Picture taken at the Friday night opening of Velle in 3D at Studio Soto

I had the loveliest encounter with a stranger today while I was riding the train from Porter Square (why does the inside of that building always smell like cigar smoke? I kind of like it.) to Kendall, where Ross was going to pick me up. The down escalator had big yellow barriers in front of it marking some kind of repair work, so I was making my way down the staircase into the station lobby. In front of me was a small woman with short white hair, probably in her sixties, walking rather slowly down the steps. When she sensed me behind her she moved over to let me go faster, if I wanted, and turned around to reveal a set of intelligent, friendly eyes behind large glasses. “The other one was broken yesterday, so of course this one had to be down today,” she said. I smiled and uttered a platitude about the rottenness of the T, and we continued to descend. At the bottom of the flight I walked slightly ahead of her, not expecting the conversation to continue, but she tossed out, “Actually, the other night I had a dream that this escalator would be broken.” I laughed, and fell back in step with her. “Yeah, who knows what they spend their money on.”

As we (rode) the escalator down to where the Inbound trains (called “Southbound trains” on the new annoucement system, just for added confusion) stop, we chatted more about the upcoming fare hike (she was mad at herself for not having sent a letter about that yet), the bizarre fact that the printed schedules the T distributes bear absolutely no relation to the schedules the bus drivers are actually operating on (this fact gleaned from conversations with bus drivers incredulous that you expected them to be there 15 minutes ago), and the politeness and efficiency of public transportation outside Boston.

We waited for the train together, and — still unsure about how long the encounter was going to last — I took my copy of Criss Cross, complete with shiny Newbery Medal sticker on it, out of my bag. “That’s a nice bag,” my new friend started to say, and then spotting my book she continued, in a tone of pleased surprise, “You like to read children’s books? I’m trying to read all the Newbery winners.”

“I have a degree in children’s literature, and I love reading children’s books.”

“That one’s — oh, it’s this year’s winner! I haven’t read it yet — can I sit beside you on the train and write down the title?”

“Of course!”

We sit. She takes out a notebook and inscribes the name and title on a fresh page, scratching her head over the name of Lois Lowry’s book The Giver while she does so — I figure out what book she means and she is delighted to have its name. “Yes! I gave that book to four people last year!”

She tells me about a new board book called “Goodnight, Boston,” and explains that she’d only recently realized that kids do, in fact, bite books. She’d seen the marks. I laugh and agree that they are dangerous book lovers. We talk a little more about books, and how there isn’t enough time to read them all, and how one leads to another because one book always raises questions that you need another one to answer.

Then she asks, “So what do you do with your degree in children’s literature?” I tell her. She asks a follow-up question, and I answer. Then she says, “What company do you work for?” and when I answer, says, “Oh — I’ve been trying to remember — I have a friend — her name is A_ _ _ _ C_ _ _ _ _ _….” she pauses.

“I know A_ _ _ _ C_ _ _ _ _ _!” I burst out. “Well, I know who she is — she probably doesn’t know who I am. She’s one of the higher-ups and I don’t work on any projects with her right now. Wow! That’s so cool!”

“Well,” she says, “Find an excuse to talk to her, and tell her Catherine says hi. She’ll know who it is.”

We shake hands and I give her my name, which she writes down on the same Criss Cross page, and we start to talk about how small the world is, and then we are at Kendall and I have to get up to go. I have an impulse to lean forward and kiss her on the cheek, just for being such delightful company for 10 minutes, and for the joy of the unexpected connection, however remote — but instead I just tell her, smiling a real smile, how nice it was to meet her and to take care, and I’m gone.