Wednesday, August 02, 2006 Poem by Susan M. Schultz

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

8 a.m.

- Mom is wearing a Kailua Surfriders Staff teeshirt this morning. That must be Bryant's old shirt. No, she insists, it's an Iowa teeshirt. The young man down the street, the one she's never met, gave her an Iowa teeshirt when he heard she'd gone to Iowa. It's Iowa.

- I didn't know she was coming today.

- She was sweet at 4 a.m., Bryant says. They had the first conversation about the shirt then.

- Israel sends more ground troops into Lebanon. There's an opportunity there, we read in the Washington Post.

- I don't like you. I don't like them. I don't like them either. And Susan? She laughs.

- Compare and contrast the acquisition of a language to its loss. Avoid the trap of merely saying that the latter happens in reverse order of the former. You are likely to do better if you see them as similar processes, though one leads to gain, the other loss. Think chemistry. Think performance of a script. Think Harold and the Purple Crayon. Think Harold Pinter.

- Think two old men fishing for a beautiful young woman in a lake. Think one of them might get "lucky."

- When are you leaving? Where are you going? Are you taking the kids?

- Sangha and May hatch plots of their own. Go quiet when I arrive. In this life, you either make plots or have them hatched around you. Like eggs. Like poisoned ones.