(no subject)

My father called just after the sun rose to say the waiting was over. He was literally unable to tell me much else.

A few hours later, my cousin Danny called. Those of my cousins who were able to be at the hospital were worried about those of us who weren't, so they wanted to check in with me, and get my sister's cell phone number. Have I mentioned that I have the best cousins in the whole world?

"He died at sunrise," Danny said. "It sounds all corny, but that's what happened. And now it's a beautiful day in Rochester."

It's overcast here in Jersey. The Weather Channel informs me that, in Rochester, it will be sunny all day, with a high of 74 degrees. The things we think at times like this.

My grandfather lived to see his eighties. He died without pain, in the company of people who loved him. His wishes were honored, meticulously. Nobody is guaranteed an end that good.

I've been so lucky in my misfortune. My mate has been grandly solicitous. My friends are numerous and kind. My family is really good at pulling together. And no matter what, this day was going to come, sooner or later. So, no complaints. Just grief.

Thank you all for your kind wishes and offers of help. The dust has settled enough that I can begin to figure out what to ask for.

I'll need someone to catsit for us while Dan and I go up for the funeral. Because I'm already prevailing upon so many people for catsitting while I'm away at festival, the conference, and the family reunion...oh, that's going to be a rough 4th of July now, isn't it...anyway...I'm hoping to spread around the karmic debt so no one person or household is looking after Sonia for more than one week. Our cat is delightful, but Route 18 traffic is not a trivial thing to ask people to face.

I wouldn't turn down a casserole or two. Past experience with family emergencies tells me that the will to cook is the first thing I lose. Dan and I are omnivores, though I'm trying to avoid fish (mercury exposure, trying to start a family, etc.).

kistha, I'd like to take you up on your offer of crash space for the Wednesday before Writer's Weekend. The energy I was going to spend on playing phone tag just went out the window. I need to simplify my personal universe a bit, and knowing where I'm going to sleep would make all the other ambiguities easier to live with.

Thank you all, dear ones.

(no subject)

The thing about getting a new pair of glasses is, you're also getting a whole new facial feature. It's a little less extreme than obtaining a new nose, but not by much.

On top of everything else this week, I've been viewing the world through a long-outdated optical prescription, because I lost my spectacles in a very silly canoeing accident. One reason I couldn't just hop in the car and drive to Rochester is, I couldn't see well enough to drive safely after dark, and nobody needed to compound the current disaster with a new one.

Before I got my bad news, I was going to write this witty little lj post about how my good spectacles were resting at the bottom of the Delaware & Raritan Canal, where they awaited discovery by some future archaeologist, and about how wearing my backup pair was sort of like losing my actual nose and having to make do with a battered Tycho Brahe costume from some long-ago Halloween. I was going to be all pleased with myself about Tycho Brahe.

Instead, I'm going to praise the kindness of the staff at the Route 18 Pearle Vision Center, who rushed my order for a replacement pair when I called to say I had to leave town for a funeral and would be grateful if they could shave a couple of days off wait.

Here I am, with a new face. It's very strange. The day of the very silly canoeing accident, I impulsively decided, instead of going with yet another variation on the usual professorial wire rims, to try something entirely different. It took me a while to figure out who I'd ever seen with frames like the ones I was considering. They're too young for me, was my first thought, but my sense of how old I am is seriously distorted by the youth of my students--the normative human being is between the ages of 13 and 17, so of course from that perspective, anyone over 30 looks ancient. Who wears frames like these? Only twentysomething fresh-out-of-college rising editors at New York publishing houses. Come to think of it, every young editor I'd ever met wore glasses like these. Well, Sarah, I said to myself, that might not be a bad thing.

Then I had to drag poor sabrinamari to the optometrist to look at me in the frames and assure me that I could get away with wearing them. It's sort of the opposite of that old Right Said Fred song, like knowing my shirt is too sexy for me. Brina was a very good sport about the whole thing, and insisted that I was in fact hip and funky enough to be morally entitled to these glasses.

Hip and funky. Think about the Sarah Avery you know. Is she hip? Is she funky? I bet those aren't the first adjectives you usually think of when my name comes up.

In a couple of weeks, I'll get used to the new face. Meanwhile, I look in the mirror, and I recognize myself, but I'm not who I expect to see, if that makes any sense at all.

Hey, Universe, my life is sufficiently defamiliarized now. I would like to stand pat for a little while. Really, this is plenty. It's more than enough.